Jack Dorsey, co-founder and chief executive of merchant processor and business-software provider Square Inc., on Tuesday pledged $1 billion for Covid-19 relief, and Mastercard Inc. committed $250 million over five years to help small businesses hit hard by the economic slowdown caused by the highly infectious disease. Those two announcements …

A decline in transactions at small and mid-size businesses accelerated through March as consumers react to shelter-at-home and social-distancing precautions, according to data from point-of-sale technology provider CardFlight Inc. But their spending shifted to e-commerce in many merchant categories, finds data from Signifyd, a vendor of e-commerce fraud solutions. Sales …

In its second major data breach in two years, hotel giant Marriott International Inc. disclosed a “property system incident” affecting personal information on 5.2 million guests. Fraudsters apparently gained access to Marriott’s systems in mid-January using the login credentials of two employees at a franchised property. Marriott, which said it discovered the …

The payment card networks plan to postpone until July changes in their interchange schedules that they had planned to take effect in April, Digital Transactions News has learned. The delays come as many merchants, especially restaurants, hotels, and local retailers have closed or greatly reduced their operations as part of governmental attempts …

Sobering data from Shift4 Payments LLC shows that U.S. hospitality-industry transaction volume plummeted in mid-March as consumers sheltered in place and travel, both business and personal, waned. Restaurant volume fell from 42 million transactions to 11 million, a 74% decrease for the period from the week of February 2 to …

Merchant processor and business-software provider Square Inc. says some of its sellers have seen declines of 45% in payment volume in recent days, and private-label and cobranded card issuer Alliance Data Systems Corp. says business at its client merchants is softening.  Both companies held conference calls with analysts after the …

New findings from a software and business-services provider that examined what happened at thousands of small businesses last week show the damage the coronavirus, or Covid-19, is inflicting on merchants. San Francisco-based Oto Analytics Inc., which does business as Womply, looked at payment card data from its merchant-acquiring partners, data …

Payment-related fraud continues to diversify as EMV chip cards make counterfeit fraud at the point of sale far harder to commit. For example, the FBI last September said cumulative global losses, as reported to the bureau, from business email compromises and other email fraud totaled $26.2 billion from June 2016 to …

All those unredeemed gift cards in people’s drawers and on dresser tops are adding up. New research from Bankrate LLC estimates the total value of Americans’ unredeemed gift cards and leftover store credits at $21 billion. Bankrate says its survey, the firm’s first of its kind, found the average adult …

How will 2019 be remembered for data breaches? Not well. The number of U.S. data breaches tracked by the Identity Theft Resource Center increased to 1,473, a 17% increase from 1,257 in 2018. Drilling into the payments sector, the increase was larger, according to a newly released report from the …